Get Out the Vote!

Cover, Statement of Vote, November 1916

In honor of Election Day today, November 8, we invite you to pause for a moment to remember voting-related City Records, collected here in the San Francisco History Center. We have two large collections of voting records--voter registration records and Statement of Vote--each of which holds its own electoral charms.

Index to Register, October 13, 1904

The Great Registers and Index to Great Registers are voter registration records that list the voter's name, address, age, political party, and occupation. Early Registers also include naturalization data, such as native country and date and place of naturalization. The San Francisco History Center has a handful of Great Registers of the City and County of San Francisco from the 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, and 1890; and the Index to the Register for 1901-1964, with some gaps in coverage. Depending on the year, Great Registers and Index to Great Registers are available in paper and/or microfilm and are stored both at the San Francisco History Center and in off-site storage. Off-site records require 24 hours' advance notice for use, so please call ahead.

At the statewide level, California Voter Registers, 1866-1898 and California Voter Registrations,1900-1968 are available online in the library via our subscription to Ancestry.com. We have a paper version of California Voter Registration for 1890 on our genealogy ready reference shelf in the reading room. If you're a buildings researcher, you can search the California Voter Registrations by address to find out who lived there. 

Statement of Vote for the City and County of San Francisco

Page view of Statement of Vote, November 1916

compiles total number of votes by assembly district and for the city as a whole, for primary, general, special, and municipal elections. Pictured here is a detail from a page of the Statement of Vote for November 1916, 27th Assembly District. Among other proposed ordinances, number nine prohibits public speaking on streets, sidewalks, and public parks. There were more yays than nays in Assembly District 27, but the measure as a whole failed by 3309 votes: 65,446 Yes to 68,755 No.  

Like the Index to the Register, Statement of Vote is available in a variety of locations and formats, depending on the dates. Paper volumes are available from either off-site storage via the San Francisco History Center (for Aug. 1906-Dec. 1979) or from the Main Library's 5th floor Paging Desk (June 1970 - November 1992,  June 1993-November 1995, and 1997-2010); digitized Statements are available online from 1995 to the present.

So, if City Hall happens to be your voting place, pop over across the street to the Main Library before or after to take a look at voting records from days gone by. And as a bonus, ask us about Elections files in our San Francisco Ephemera Collection! That might be a blog post for another Election Day.